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Updated: June 9, 2025
The government, even before the war, was singularly reticent about the Zeppelins, their numbers and plans. It is certain that orders were not withheld from the Count. Great numbers of his machines were built, especially after the war was entered upon. But he was not permitted longer to have a monopoly of government aid for manufacturers of dirigibles.
They were full of the Lusitania business, bomb dropping from Zeppelins, and the treatment of our prisoners. But when the time came there was a complete revulsion of feeling. They were kindness itself, and when the prisoners came on board the seamen met the seamen and escorted them forward like honoured guests, while our stokers did the same for their opposite numbers.
By the outbreak of war, nearly 30 Zeppelins had been constructed; considerably more than half of these were destroyed in various ways, but the experiments carried on with each example of the type permitted of improvements being made.
In sheltered America we cannot realize what war means, but when we entered the warring countries of Europe, in an instant we were in a different atmosphere. We landed in England upon a darkened coast, we entered a darkened train, where every blind was drawn lest it furnish a guide to London for invading Zeppelins or aeroplanes.
Consider now an aëroplane at an elevation of 6,000 feet and remember that the new Zeppelins have gone thousands of feet higher. An aviator at 6,000 feet is so cold that he is practically useless for anything but guiding his machine. How in the world is he or his seat-mate going to do harm to a big craft the size of the Zeppelin that is far above him?
But the progress of the construction of Zeppelins for the next few years was curiously compounded of success and failure. Fate seemed to have decreed to every Zeppelin triumph a disaster. Each mischance was attributed to exceptional conditions which never could happen again, but either they did occur, or some new but equally effective accident did.
However, two of the Zeppelins were forced down in Essex; one of them was destroyed together with its crew; the other managed to make a landing and its crew of twenty-one were made prisoners. Two days later, during the night of September 25, 1916, a smaller squadron of about six airships attacked the northeastern and southern counties of England.
While it is generally maintained that the Zeppelins will prove formidable in attack, greater reliance is being placed upon the demoralising or terrifying effect which they are able to exercise.
As the weeks passed by and the months, and still no Zeppelins came, the menace became a jest. The very word of Zeppelin was heard with hilarity. There were comic articles in the newspapers, taunting the German Count who had made those gas-bags. There were also serious articles proving the impossibility of a raid by airships. They would be chased by French aviators as soon as they were sighted.
One great military advantage of the Parseval was that she could be quickly deflated in the presence of danger at her moorings, and wholly knocked down and packed in small compass for shipment by rail in case of need. To neither of these models did there ever come such a succession of disasters as befell the earlier Zeppelins.
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